Missing the Big Picture by Donovan, Luke (great book club books txt) 📕

he was significantly older than what he originally told me, but that “I do love to suck dick.” So I met him at Bruegger’s. Luckily I just looked at him, and we both walked away. That wasn’t something that I was proud of. I was twenty-two and had never had any type of sex before. I was vulnerable, and when I found personal ads about casual sex, my vulnerabilities came into play.

I never thought I would ever tell anybody that I liked men. Homosexuality was something I hated. I was a white male who always did well in school and was seen as a member of the majority, so why would I want to face discrimination as a minority? Still, in the midst of my grad school studies and my internship at the Sanchez group home I started to meet people on the Internet. I remember the first time I actually went to a guy’s house. I had heard the horror stories about meeting people online and how it was best to meet in public first. The man who I met first actually just convinced me to go to his apartment. He was actually twenty years older than me and a bodybuilder. It was tax season, and he was an accountant. He offered me a drink, and then we started to fool around. I remember being incredibly nervous and feeling his disappointment. He also mentioned that he was in an open relationship with his partner, meaning they had no restrictions on who they could both sleep with. I wasn’t convinced that his partner accepted this fully. I already had his phone number, and I was new to the casual sex/hookup scene, so I kept calling him for days. It was by far the world’s worst hookup. You’re just looking for a one-night stand, and you get this kid who has never done anything physically before, and he then constantly hounds you. If that isn’t a lesson about not cheating on your partner, I don’t know what is.

All I can remember was that as I was lying there with that man, besides noticing his amazing body, I kept thinking that this was so much more exciting than working at the group home. I was a master’s-level intern, and all I did was watch cartoons and reality shows with the children. My supervisor was very burned out. In fact, in my interview she actually mentioned that most social workers get burned out in only three years, and she’d been there three years at that point. Once when three of the children were being restrained, the direct care supervisor told me to get the social worker, Lisa, to assist the staff in de-escalating the situation. Lisa was meeting with another social worker and told me, “Well, we got things we have to do.”

I dreaded going to my field placement every time. Sometimes I would talk to staff members who had been doing that work for ten or twenty years. Many people in this country feel that teachers are underpaid, but I believe that direct care staffers who make sacrifices and put their own safety at risk to help abused children are true American heroes. One woman, Sandy, was a direct care worker for seventeen years and always came to work with a smile on her face. No matter what any of the kids did to her, she always cared for them and listened. All of the staffers brainstormed ways to reduce the incidents of violence that occurred in the home. Each time a physical intervention had to be performed, an incident report had to be filled out. Then a panel of incident review committee members would meet and develop ideas on how to prevent future incidents. However, for most of the children, the group home was their last resort. Knowing this caused a lot of anxiety, depression, and anger among the kids. Before coming to the home, a lot of the children had been bounced around foster families and different family members. None of it had worked out.

My internship would come to a close abruptly in March, eight weeks before it was supposed to. Sage, the girl who I was tutoring in math, wrote a nine-page suicide note and the social worker didn’t know what to do. It was the agency psychologist’s decision to call the police and see if Sage needed to go to the hospital. The police were phoned, and the children were ordered to stay in their bedrooms. One of the younger residents, a fourteen-year-old male, was defiant and went out of his room and threatened to pull the smoke alarm. Two staff members were trying to persuade him to go back into his bedroom, when a direct care worker took the resident by his arm and just walked with him to his bedroom. I don’t know what happened or if the boy resisted. A few moments later, I had to help the student write an apology letter. He told me that he’d gotten a rug burn from when the staff member touched him. I didn’t know if restraint had been involved, so I asked the staff member about what happened and let him know that the resident was complaining of rug burn and that maybe he should see the nurse. My supervisor was in the office with Sage so I decided to e-mail her and explain what happened with the alleged rug burn. She didn’t get it until Monday, even though I originally e-mailed her on Thursday afternoon. The next day I went to my internship like nothing happened.

A week after the “rug burn” incident occurred, my supervisor reprimanded me, saying it was wrong for me to not immediately notify anybody in person and that I put the client’s safety in jeopardy. A week later, I had to have a meeting with my field supervisor and two representatives from the school of social work. All I remember was that they met for a few minutes before I was in